July 14, 2016 Source

While the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) won the presidency easily in 1992, it was one seat short of a majority in Parliament and needed one of the two smaller opposition parties to help it to get there.

Whether the PPP/C needed the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) or The United Force (TUF) to give it a majority in the 1992 Parliament was recently raised by several letter writers in the Stabroek News.

The reportage of that period in the pages of Stabroek News showed that after the official results of the historic elections were declared after some delay, the PPP/C could be certain of 32 of the 65 seats, the then PNC 27, the WPA 1 and  TUF 1. Four seats were still up in the air as a result of the unique method of determining Members of Parliament for the regional system.

The PPP/C’s 32 assured seats comprised 28 from the general elections and one each for Regions 2,3, 5 and 6 where it had overwhelming majorities. However even where overwhelming majorities existed there was a chance that the voting at the regional democratic councils for the MPs could be bungled as eventually happened in Region One (Barima/Waini) to the PNC.

The PNC’s 27 seats comprised 23 from the general elections and four in the regions where it also had majorities: 1, 4, 7 and 10. The other two seats from the national elections went to the WPA and the TUF. The WPA had the electoral quota for one seat and TUF captured the final seat as it had the highest remainder.

That left the seats for Regions 8 (Potaro/Siparuni) and Region Nine (Upper Takutu/Upper Essequibo) to be decided. In these two regions, as has been the case for some of the more recent elections, votes were widely split meaning that various alliances could be struck to control the largest block on the council and hence determine who would be the MP for that region.

When all 10 of the regional MPs were elected, a meeting of the now-disbanded National Council for Local Democratic Organs (NCLDO) would be convened as it would determine who the final two MPs were. Whichever party or combination of parties controlled the majority of regions at this NCLDO meeting would get to decide on both MPs.

This was the scenario that the PPP/C faced in 1992 even though it won 162,058 of the 303,186 votes or 53.4% of the vote compared to the PNC’s 42.3% with the remainder split among the other parties.

While it was short of one seat, observers point out that the PPP/C would have been supremely confident that a deal could be easily struck with either the WPA or TUF for one of, or both of the regional seats considering that they had been allies in a long fight to unseat the PNC over rigged elections extending all the way back to 1968. Its association with the WPA in the struggle against rigged elections was decades long while its partnership with TUF – mainly in the ambit of the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD), was of more recent vintage.

So even though relations with the WPA were fraught with tension in the aftermath of the collapse of the PCD before the elections and the bitterly contested campaign, it was clear from statements by both parties after October 5th that a deal could be reached for Region 8 which would give the PPP/C the seat needed for a majority and even one for Region Nine where the only way the PPP/C-WPA alliance could be thwarted was if TUF voted with the PNC, a non-starter.

So days after the 1992 elections it was clear that a PPP/C-WPA deal was imminent and that this would eventually lead to a comfortable majority for the PPP/C.  A deal was reached late October where it was agreed that the WPA would support the PPP/C for the Region Eight seat and the WPA would then in turn be allowed to nominate one of the two NCLDO MPs to parliament. The TUF would later announce its support for the PPP/C for the Region Nine seat without condition.

These developments then meant that the PPP/C’s 32-seat tally would go up by three: the Region Eight seat, the Region Nine seat and one of the NCLDO seats. This would then leave it at 35, with the PNC on 27, the WPA on 2 and TUF on one. The drama was however not over. The PPP/C would eventually end up with 36 of the seats in parliament and the PNC 26.In a demonstration of how nothing could be taken for granted, the PNC councillors bungled the voting in Region One, allowing the PPP/C to capture that parliamentary seat.  The PNC had eight seats on the council while the PPP/C had five and TUF 2. It transpired that the PNC regional chairman Yvonne Hercules was incorrectly advised that she could not vote when the PPP/C and TUF combined to challenge the PNC. In fact Hercules could have voted and also had the authority to cast a tie-breaking vote. However, this was not exercised and the PPP/C’s candidate  for MP won the vote.